Feedback Right in Google Sites

It's wonderful - two new links in the MORE drop down box: one leads you to the Google Sites Help Forum, the other leads you to Google Feedback (my first encounter with this wonderful tool.

Check out my experience below. Now you can 'Report an Issue' as soon as it crops up, or just make a suggestion.

Google Sites Partnership: Appirio & Kirksville Web Design

Interviewer: +Kyle Horst, Owner, Kirksville Web Design
Interviewee: +David Spangler, Google Apps Solutions Architect, Appirio

How is Appirio offering Google Sites?
Appirio has partnered with Kirksville Web Design for a number of Google Sites projects, ranging from Corporate Intranet design to POC (Proof of Concept) demo sites. In addition, we’ve been working on solutions to assist customers with moving away from heavy, premised-based intranet systems (like SharePoint) by leveraging the Google Enterprise suite focused on a combination of Google Sites and Google Drive capabilities. The designers at Kirksville Web Design are able to deliver an exciting product that fits within the frameworks of Google Sites.


Can you describe some of your Sites projects? What were the results?
In our work with a large, multi-national pharmaceutical organization, we partnered with Kirksville to provide a revamp of their Google Apps launch site. The site was a rebuild/rethink away from their legacy delivery framework. In less than five weeks, we were able to provide the design, corrections and launch with no additional purchases of hardware or software.


How can organizations make the most of Sites?
When you have already invested in Google Apps for your business, it makes sense to explore the abilities of Google Sites to enhance (and possible replace) existing, expensive systems and infrastructure. Google Sites is already part of the enterprise suite that you can access with your Google Apps license and is completely integrated into the Google Apps framework.


Where would you like to see Sites head in the next couple years?
It would be great to see Sites continue to provide framework enhancements building on what’s already available, especially around Google Drive and the requirements for enterprise level CMS (Content Management Systems). Also, a continued focus on specialized mobile access controls.


What else does Appirio offer?
Appirio is a global services provider who uses crowdsourcing and cloud, social and mobile technology to help enterprises reimagine their business and become more agile. Appirio brings together technology expertise with a deep understanding of the way people work, and the development, design and analytics skills of a 600,000 person global crowdsourcing community.

Tip - Discover Inkscape

You have proudly developed a freeware arsenal for web design.  Your using Google Sites, GIMP, but you want to create finished graphic products.  I have experimented for the past couple weeks with Inkscape - free vector image editor. What's a vector image?  See below and you'll get a grasp of what I'm talking about.

Now, I know you have a lot on your table: You've learned Google Sites, you tackled the learning curve of a photo-editing program, and now vector imaging is another big task. I would encourage you to dive right in and play around, view tutorials which are essential to building skills.

I would like all Google Sites designers to be enabled to do more and do it well.  Reverse a stereo-type that we take the easy way out, remind our customers that we strive to be more creative artistically.

My business, Kirksville Web Design, is getting better, because either you are growing or your deteriorating. Keep honing those skills! Check out what I made with this tutorial.  I was amazed.

Favorite Free Font - Arvil Sans

Avril Sans from the Lost Type Co-Op is an awesome sans-serif / all caps / condensed font that I have recently used a few web design projects here lately.

It's beautiful, it's free. I'll keep this post short and sweet because it speaks for itself.

This font is a ton of fun. Enjoy the graphic =).

Google Sites Training Videos

The New Website:
www.googlesitestraining.com

The Purpose:Provide quick and informative video tutorials for using Google Sites to a broad audience of company end-users, small businesses and inquisitive individuals.

The Approach:
Short & Fast paced - we keep our videos under 5 minutes to ensure your attention span isn't taxed and that viewers walk away with the information they need.

One of Our New Videos:

Major Bug Report - Background Image Fixed Position

UPDATE 2/16/2012: This bug has been fixed! Thanks to all that participated on the Google Sites Forum to get this addresses. The Google Sites team resolved this quickly and effectively!


The Bug


The background image has a fixed position on the page. For instance, when you scroll down the page, the background image occupies the same space regardless of where you've scrolled. This is breaking most designed Google Sites.

The footer is eating my content. Help!

The Effect


The Google Sites help forums are totally abuzz with complaints, probably fueled by customers/clients pestering their web designers. This is a huge problem that came out of nowhere and has many designer caught off-guard.

It has been escalated to Google representatives.

This isn't good...at all.

Conclusion


The whole issue calls into question the Google Sites team's beta-testing of updates and truthfully whether they test at all. This problem is readily visible and annoying.

On the other hand, perhaps this means that Google is working on a new patch to the Google Sites platform, more specifically in the design field. This has happened before. I know people have asked for the ability to create a fixed background image, like in blogger, before. Maybe that's it.

Overall, bear with the inconvenience and hope for a quick-fix, instead of a 'working as intended' (hopefully not!).

Here's my post on the forums if you wish to chime in: https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/d/topic/sites/tvlVGnJJ_3s/discussion

Tip - Creating a Footer

Now, we can take a closer look around the footer of Google sites.
I need a custom footer like this,

So I created an image like this. Now I need to upload this image into Google sites.

---

Somebody asked me about the difference between uploading as 'background image' and 'wrapper background image'.
I'll show you the difference.

This is the Original image:
When I upload the image as 'background image, the result is:

See the top.
So, look at the same image uploaded as 'wrapper background image':

OK. Now it clarified, right?

---

Come to the point.
We need a custom footer image like the first original image.
I did upload in as a 'wrapper background image'. The result is good. Look:

But, when the content is too long, or in the announcement page, it looks odd.
See,

This is not we want, right?
So, I did two images like this: One,

Another one is,

Then, I upload the first image as 'wrapper background image', and the second one as ' background image'.
See the specification:

Now it's done. Look at the results!

Talk to the Google Sites Team

Hello Everyone. This is just a quick reminder of the importance of user feedback and input on surveys. If you have a suggestion, concern or gripe with Google Sites, the "Take our survey!" option is the best way you've got to do so. It's your way to talk to the Google Sites team.

Therefore, please take the survey. Suggest something amazing like adding a tagging system to Google Sites, more usable themes or viewer commenting / login function.

I'm not sure if this link will work for long or for everyone, but here's a shot: https://survey.googleratings.com/wix/p3925964.aspx

Click on this image to take a survey now.

Thanks!

Google Sites Updates Incoming

It's been a historical fact that when Google Sites gets some updates or upgrades, it starts acting a little funny. That's why I'm here to give you a bug report and note some changes occurring.

Bug Report

Before today, you could add "spacers" into the horizontal navigation bar by Adding a URL, Hitting Space Bar for the Title, and putting a URL in the Web Address Field. No link would be visible or Link Title, but it would add some space between two normal links.

Now, if your Link Title has just spaces, it will display the Link URL you put in. Therefore, you can't reasonably space out your links with this method anymore.

So far it is not retro-active, affecting your existing spacers.

Update Report

Site Search Configuration has moved. It used to be located in Site Layout and, perhaps in line with Edit Site Layout changes, they have moved it to the General Settings Section.

Stay tuned for upcoming changes as they happen. I'll keep you updated! Thanks.

Tip - Using Social Media Buttons

Hey, I'm Web Princess aka Beckystar and welcome to my first blog, thank you Kyle for having me!

Using social media buttons to share your site or content is easy and expected by your visitors.

Social buttons or icons facilitate the sharing of your site, content or blog and are now a linchpin of social media. It’s not enough to simply produce content these days. Your fans (hooray for them!) want a gizmo (I prefer gizmo to gadget) in place to allow them to share what they have read or seen with their family, friends and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter etc. Lucky for us there are some great tools out there.

Next I have featured my top 3.

1. AddThis is my favourite. All you have to do is join, and it's free! However it does not work on google sites. All is not lost as good news! The amazing guys at AddThis have provided us with a google sites gadget. Go to your site, hit edit page and place your cursor where you want your social media buttons. Click on insert then more gadgets, in the search box type addthis6 and add the gadget (height 32 pixels width 180 pixels). Check it out working on my sites home page http://www.webprincess.co.uk

You can customise the gizmo when you select it such as changing the background colour or even which buttons you want to display.

2. Sharethis is another great option. It is very useful, they have a powerful market place and can reach 400+ million people or 50 social media channels! Albeit brilliant if you can access your html but yet again it does not work for google sites. I like to fight the good fight so I have emailed them asking for a google sites gadget.

3. If you don't want a gizmo you can simply insert an image on your site and link it to your facebook group page or to your tweets etc.

You can get your hands on a list of free, creative social buttons from Open Source Hunter. There are 128 to choose from, but, remember they are for you to link yourself. Check out the twitter and facebook buttons working on this site's home page: http://www.thequeenofspadesboston.co.uk/

If you literally only care about who likes your site grab a code from the facebook developers.

I hope that this has inspired you to add social media buttons to your site/blog etc.

Did you enjoy my first blog? Please feel free to leave a comment.

Beckystar x
PS: What is your favourite social media button?

Tutorial - Creating A Mobile Site with Google Sites

In a world of mobile devices, there is an easy (you can call it that) way to get your Google site to become a mobile web site. You'll have to re-design your site to fit a mobile device, which means your site will be shaved down a lot, but not so much as to steer customers away.

Ok, I use Photoshop CS5 to design, so we need to start by creating a new image.

Use the size of W400 H480. These sizes are your typical smart phone dimensions. The screen resolution will make your site fit correctly in the screen of the phone.

Now, using your layers, create a folder or set of folders to help organize your layers.

You can start to design a site the way you typically start. For this site, I am using a No header site. This way, your links will be at the very top and it will help viewers see your main pages at first glance.

Your site width for the actually viewing needs to be 320px. The left over will help create the border around your site. The height doesn't matter.

Here is a view of my overall Photoshop design for the site. It's simple and clean, not a lot of graphics, or photo effects. Remember having a site that has a heavy/large image file to load, will turn a customer away in a second.

Now its time for you to create a mobile Google Site. Start off by using the typical setup of your sites. Use the Blank Slate theme, its the best way to go for designing this type of site. When setting up your site layout, make the width 320px. Remember thats the area for your content. Use Horizontal Navigation Bar.

Once you play around with what works best in your colors and styles you should have a nice looking mobile site going on!

Here is a link to the site https://sites.google.com/site/3sgmobile/ you can type it in your mobile phone and see what a great way to get needed info to clients via mobile.

Hope this was a good tutorial for you. Any questions feel free to leave a comment.

Google SItes Directory

Add Your Site - It's FREE!

Happy Friday!

Beckystar here .... I put together a little treat for you ... sorry it's not chocolate but it is a google sites directory, soon to be the biggest online. Check it out here!

There are simply some excellent google sites out there so it's a great tool to get some design inspiration and gadget ideas from. Let me know what you think.

Whilst you are here ....

Don't forget whilst you are here add your google site to the directory and get more viewers!

Web Developer extension and the choice of Best Web Browser

If you are a web developer then the question is quite common which is

the best web browser for web development . In this tech arena every

browser want to take the number one tag. In this blog I am going to

share my favorite browser and why it became number one .

Mozilla Firefox is my favorite, I accept chrome has taken the market

share for being light and fast, internet explorer 10 is also doing well

but still I die for firefox. Right now I use Firefox 18 , in speed its

par with chrome and IE 10 in some cases faster, but right now we use

modern computer that has atleast 1GB of RAM and dual core CPU so you

can't see the speed difference only benchmarks can tell the difference.

Firefox uses more memory around 130MB but its not a problem.

Firefox offers net and clean interface, always welcome new technologies,

devoted towards open source and also stable and secure. Its extension

arena has everything you need and it makes you special , chrome also

supports extension and has decent store where you can download and

install extension with no restart feature but firefox interface is

awesome as firefox is feature rich compared to chrome. IE is by greedy

microsoft the company is not listening to its old customer as the

support of IE10 is limited to Windows 8 still now does not supports

multiplatform so it was ommitted from my list.



Firefox and the extension we die for :

If we are a web developer or SEO Expert then Firefox makes you job easy,

I am going to share a partial list of my favorite extension.



1. ADBLOCK PLUS

Web Designer has to surf a lot to get new ideas or inspiration but the

the annoying ads and pop ups make the job hard, adblock plus not only

block all these but gives you interface to control it.



2. Colorzilla

If you are a web designer or UI designer then you can't stop yourselve

playing with colors. This is not a color picker tool but has eyedropper

and other cool option.



3. Firebug

HTML , HTML5 , CSS , javascript wonder which kind of scripting is using

this firebug is the only solution, it give not only to view source of

website but with advance option. This is Web Designer no. one app.



4. Webrankstat

This is a SEO tool provides alexa rank, google rank,page index

,backlinks and other information while surfing.



list is going to updated soon.

Google Groups and Drawings

Kyle here with Kirksville Web Design and another Google Sites update. The Google Apps teams is always kind enough to announce changes and roll them out slowly. Sometimes you'll stumble upon them randomly and say 'woah didn't know that was there.' Then you question yourself as to maybe it was there all along and you are losing your mind.

Anyways, this is another smallish update to Sites (I haven't been too terribly excited since horizontal navigation rolled out 8/19/2010).


Google Groups Discussion Forums

There have been several occasions where I have recommended the use of Google Groups Discussion Forums. Since the beautification of this tool, it has garnered more recognition.

It was always a hassle to direct clients to More Gadgets, so this is convenient. It's still a bit clunky to setup I think. You need to setup the group, grab the url, and throw it in the gadget. You've easily wasted 10 minutes just to get a commenting functionality.

To fix this, I would like to see the insert of the Google Groups Discussion Forum streamlined.

Easy to find, Not so easy to use

Drawings Gadget

I tried creating a drawing in Google Docs and didn't like it too much. So being able to insert a drawing into my Google Site doesn't appeal too much to me.

I can see it being useful for wireframe drawings, flowcharts, but nothing too fancy.

Any thoughts on Drawings in Google Docs, then embedded into Google Sites?

  
Uploading Images and Attachments

Who doesn't love to see how their upload is coming along? Great feature that is appreciated for those larger file uploads.

Another feature that could be added is a multiple file upload capability. It's a drag to add files one-by-one. I did find a great solution in Cloud Sherpas Mass Upload Tool. It's free for 5 files at a time. Thanks + Cloud Sherpas for that one.

Here's the original information from the Google Apps Team

Scheduled Release Track 1/31/2012
- Groups Discussion Forums can be inserted via the ‘insert’ menu.
- Drawings gadget: Drawings can be inserted as a gadget via the ‘insert’ menu when editing a page.
- New interface when uploading images and attachments

New Google Sites Update - Copy Page, Open Nav Link in New Tab

Hello Everybody! +Kyle Horst here with a great new set of updates to Google Sites. 2014 won't be the year Sites is left in the lurch. So let's cover these two new features.

1. Copy Page
Creating a Page Template using the "Save as Page Template" feature was alright, but Copy Page makes the process that much easier and less of an investment. Copying a page is right in the More dropdown menu next to Move Page and Print Page.

2. Open Navigation Link in a New Window
The navigation gadget received an upgrade with the new "open this link in a new window" checkbox option. It is part of the Add URL (not add page) option in the configure navigation windows. This is great for opening external website in a new tab or window, since you don't always want visitor to navigate away from your site. Great for intranet usage!

That wraps this episode up of Google Sites' new features. Let me know if I missed anything of course.

Thanks!

PHP Image upload , Saving link to Database complete tutorial

This blog is dedicated to all our visitors who asked me to publish a working tutorial on  image upload  using PHP and Saving its path to Mysql Table.

How to do that :
First we will create a file called install.php , it will create a database called
myimages and a table  named imgtables and also create a folder called gallery where we are going to store  images.

Create a file name install.php
------------------------------------------------------

<?php
/*
file name : Install.php
purpose : creating a database name myimages
and table imgtables
Create by : Sanjay Prasad
sonzoy@gmail.com
http://www.openplus.in
*/

$db=mysqli_connect("localhost","root","");

if($db->connect_errno){
    echo "Error <br/>".$sp->error;
}

$query="create database if not exists myimages";

if($db->query($query)){
     echo "Created database myimages ..<br/>";   
    
     $sp=mysqli_connect("localhost","root","","myimages");
         if($sp->connect_errno){
                echo "Error <br/>".$sp->error;
            }
           
            $tbquery="create table if not exists imgtables(
            id int unsigned auto_increment primary key,
            imgurl varchar(255),
            date varchar(100)


            )engine='InnoDB'";
           
            if($sp->query($tbquery)){
                echo "Table imgtables created Successfully  ..<br/> ";   
            }else{
                echo "Error <br/>".$sp->error;       
            }
           
            //creating directory gallery
           
            if(mkdir("gallery",0777)){
                echo "Folder gallery create successfully";
            }else{
                echo "Error Creating Directory";
            }

    }
else{
    echo "Error <br/>".$sp->error;   
    }   

?>

Now We have to create a file name gallery.php, which will upload images to folder gallery and saved their name like flower.jpg on table filed imgurl.

gallery.php

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>File Uploading</title>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
</head><body>
<?php
$sp=mysqli_connect("localhost","root","","myimages");
         if($sp->connect_errno){
                echo "Error <br/>".$sp->error;
}

$path="gallery/";

if(isset($_POST['upload']))
{

$path=$path.$_FILES['file_upload']['name'];
   
if(move_uploaded_file($_FILES['file_upload']['tmp_name'],$path))
{
echo " ".basename($_FILES['file_upload']['name'])." has been uploaded<br/>";
echo '<img src="gallery/'.$_FILES['file_upload']['name'].'" width="48" height="48"/>';
$img=$_FILES['file_upload']['name'];
    $query="insert into imgtables (imgurl,date) values('$img',now())";
    if($sp->query($query)){
     echo "<br/>Inserted to DB also";   
    }else{
        echo "Error <br/>".$sp->error;       
    }


}
else
{
echo "There is an error,please retry or ckeck path";
}
}
?>
<form action="gallery.php" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
<table width="384" border="1" align="center">
<tr>
<td width="108">Select File</td>
<td width="260"><label>
<input type="file" name="file_upload">
</label></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><label>
<input type="submit" name="upload" value="Upload File">
</label></td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>
</body></html>